Bahamas Sawshark

• Maximum lengthAbout 81 cm (2.7 ft); born at roughly 30 cm
• WeightNo reliable measurement; a few kilograms at most
• LifespanUnknown
• Depth rangeAbout 400–1,000 m (1,300–3,300 ft)
• DietUnknown; presumed small bottom fishes, shrimps and squid
• IUCN statusLeast Concern (assessed 2019; formerly Data Deficient)

How to recognize a Bahamas sawshark

Start with the saw. The snout is drawn out into a long, flat, narrow blade, about a quarter of the animal's total length, with a row of teeth along each edge: 13 or 14 large, sharp rostral teeth on each side in front of the barbels and another 9 or 10 behind them, with smaller teeth set between the large ones. Roughly midway along the saw hangs a pair of long, fleshy barbels, the feelers the shark trails over the bottom. Behind the saw the head is flattened, with big oval eyes on top, large spiracles and five gill slits on the sides.

That last point matters, because the same region is home to the smalltooth sawfish, a critically endangered ray with a superficially similar blade. A sawfish has its gill slits underneath the head, no barbels, and rostral teeth of equal size; a sawshark has side gills, barbels and alternating large and small teeth. Our page on the difference between sharks and rays covers the rest.

The body behind the head is slender and slightly flattened, with two dorsal fins of similar size, both without spines, broad pectoral fins and no anal fin. The tail has a long upper lobe and almost no lower lobe. Color is a plain pale gray-brown above shading to white below, with no spots, bands or blotches; the longnose sawshark of Australia, by contrast, is marked with dark stripes along the saw and blotches on the body. No other sawshark occurs in the Atlantic, so a sawshark trawled between Florida and Cuba is this species by default.

How big is a Bahamas sawshark?

Small. The largest specimens on record measure about 80 to 81 cm (2.6 to 2.7 ft) in total length, and most of the animals in museum collections are considerably shorter. Since the saw is roughly a quarter of that, the body of a full-grown animal is barely 60 cm long. Nobody has published a weight; a shark this size weighs a few kilograms at the very most.

The size at birth is known from the smallest free-swimming specimens and from late-term embryos: about 30 cm (12 in), which is a large pup for so small a shark and suggests, as in other sawsharks, that litters are modest. The length at which males and females mature has not been established; the largest males examined had fully formed claspers, so it presumably comes at around 60 to 70 cm.

Compared with its relatives, the Bahamas sawshark is at the small end of the family. The longnose sawshark of southern Australia reaches about 1.4 m and the Japanese sawshark a little more than that; only the African dwarf sawshark and a couple of other recently described species are smaller. On the bar below, the largest specimen known barely reaches a 1.8 m diver's waist.

Where the Bahamas sawshark lives

The known range is one of the smallest of any shark. Every confirmed specimen has come from the western central Atlantic in the triangle between the Bahamas, the north coast of Cuba and Florida: the deep slopes of the Great and Little Bahama Banks, the Santaren and Nicholas channels, the Straits of Florida and the edge of the Cuban shelf. The species was described in 1960 by Stewart Springer and Harvey Bullis from animals trawled by the United States research vessel Oregon, and named for the ichthyologist William Schroeder.

Within that triangle it is a slope animal, taken between roughly 400 and 1,000 m (1,300 and 3,300 ft) on or just above the bottom, in dark water of a steady 5 to 12 °C (41 to 54 °F). It has never been caught on the continental slope of the North American mainland north of the Straits, although that ground has been trawled for decades, nor in the Gulf of Mexico or the wider Caribbean. The deep water of the Florida Straits and the Old Bahama Channel probably forms a barrier that keeps the population confined to the Bahamian and Cuban slopes.

Because it lives so deep and so locally, the Bahamas sawshark is a species almost no one has seen alive. The reef sharks that draw divers to the Bahamas live 400 m above it, and the few images that exist are of trawled specimens and recent deep-water camera footage from the Bahamian slopes.

What does the Bahamas sawshark eat?

Nobody knows, because nobody has published a stomach analysis. What can be said comes from the sawsharks that have been studied, chiefly the longnose and southern sawsharks of Australia and the Japanese sawshark, which eat small bottom-living fishes, shrimps, squid and other soft invertebrates. A Bahamas sawshark almost certainly lives the same way on the slopes off the Bahamas, where the likely prey are lanternfish, small cods and eels, deep-water shrimps and squid.

The equipment tells the same story. The barbels are feelers, packed with touch and taste receptors, that the shark trails over the sediment to detect buried animals, and the underside of the saw is lined with the ampullae of Lorenzini, which pick up the faint electrical field of a shrimp's muscles through sand. Once prey is located the saw does the work: sawsharks slash it from side to side to stun or injure the target, then pick up the pieces with a small mouth set well back under the head. The mouth teeth are small and cuspidate, made for gripping soft prey, not cutting.

The saw teeth are not replaced like the teeth in a shark's jaw; when one breaks it is gone, although new teeth do grow in at the edges as the saw lengthens with age. Older specimens show gaps and worn stubs along the blade, one of the few hints that the species lives long enough for its equipment to wear out.

Behavior and adaptations to the deep slope

Almost everything written about the behavior of this species is inference. No Bahamas sawshark has been tracked, and none has been kept alive long enough to watch. The anatomy and habitat say this much: it is a sluggish bottom-dweller of the slope that keeps close to the sediment where its barbels and saw are useful. The large eyes and spiracles are typical of deep-living sharks, which take in oxygen through the spiracles while resting on the bottom and need big eyes to make use of the little light that reaches 500 m.

Sawsharks elsewhere are known to gather in small groups, and trawls off the Bahamas have taken several Bahamas sawsharks at once, which suggests the species is at least loosely gregarious or, more simply, that suitable ground is patchy and the sharks concentrate on it.

The saw itself is the species' defining adaptation, and it evolved at least twice: once in sawsharks, which are true sharks, and separately in sawfishes, which are rays. The two groups arrived at the same tool for the same job, finding and disabling small prey on a soft bottom, from different ancestors, a case of convergence described on our evolution of sharks page. In sawsharks the teeth on the blade are modified skin denticles rather than true teeth, which is why they are not shed and replaced the way jaw teeth are (see shark anatomy).

Reproduction and lifespan

The Bahamas sawshark is presumed to be viviparous without a placenta, the mode found in every sawshark that has been examined: the eggs hatch inside the mother and the embryos develop on the yolk in their yolk sacs until they are born as free-swimming miniatures. This is one of the four reproductive strategies of sharks.

Litter size, gestation and the timing of births have not been recorded for this species. In the longnose sawshark litters run from 3 to 22 pups and pregnancy lasts about a year; in the Japanese sawshark litters of around a dozen are usual. A Bahamas sawshark, being smaller, probably carries fewer, and at about 30 cm the pups are a third of the mother's length, which leaves little room for a large litter. As in other sawsharks, the rostral teeth of the embryos lie folded flat against the saw and are covered by a sheath of skin until after birth, so that they do not injure the mother.

Age and growth are unknown. No vertebrae have been sectioned and no tagged animal has been recaptured; the worn saws of the largest specimens are the only evidence of a long life. Small deep-water sharks that have been aged live for decades, grow slowly and mature late (see how long sharks live), which is exactly what makes them vulnerable if a fishery ever reaches them.

Is the Bahamas sawshark dangerous?

No, and it could not be. A Bahamas sawshark lives at 400 m and below, where no swimmer, surfer or scuba diver goes; the only people who have ever touched one are fisheries scientists sorting a trawl catch. Its mouth is small and its jaw teeth are tiny, built to grip a shrimp. The saw can cut a careless hand on deck, as any toothed blade can, but a sawshark does not wield it against people, and there is no record of one doing so. The SharkSider database has no incident attributed to this species, and the Bahamas attack record is made up entirely of the reef and oceanic sharks that live in the shallows far above it.

If anything, the relationship runs the other way. The greatest danger the Bahamas sawshark faces from people is not attention but its absence: a species that nobody sees, nobody fishes and nobody studies can slip out of existence without anyone noticing. The shallow-water sharks of the Bahamas are among the best protected in the world; their deep-water neighbour is protected mostly by being out of reach.

The SharkSider database has no incident attributed to this species. The database draws on the International Shark Attack File, the Global Shark Attack File and verified local reports, and is updated weekly.

Conservation status

The IUCN Red List currently rates the Bahamas sawshark as Least Concern (assessed 2019). For years it sat in the Data Deficient category, as the older version of this page reported, but the most recent assessment concluded that the absence of any deep-water fishery across its range means the population, whatever its size, is not being reduced. That is a judgement about threats, not numbers: no one has estimated how many exist or which way the population is heading.

The protection it enjoys is real, if indirect. In 2011 the Bahamas banned all commercial shark fishing throughout its 630,000 km² exclusive economic zone, one of the largest shark sanctuaries in the world, and Cuba adopted a national plan of action for sharks in 2015. Bottom trawling on the slopes of the Bahama Banks and the Straits of Florida is essentially nonexistent. The species is not listed under CITES or the Convention on Migratory Species, and no sawshark is.

The old page credited Mexico with taking action for this species under its 2004 shark plan; the Bahamas sawshark does not occur in Mexican waters, so whatever that plan covered, it was not this shark. The threats that could matter in future are the ones that reach deep water: oil and gas exploration on the slopes, deep-sea mining and, over the long term, warming and deoxygenation of slope waters. A species with a range this small has nowhere to retreat to. See also why sharks are endangered.

Similar species and close relatives

The Bahamas sawshark is one of about ten species in the family Pristiophoridae, all but one in the genus Pristiophorus. Its closest relatives live on the other side of the world: the Japanese sawshark of the north-western Pacific, the longnose sawshark and shortnose sawshark of southern Australia, the tropical sawshark of Queensland and Lana's sawshark of the Philippines. The African dwarf sawshark off Mozambique is the only other sawshark from an ocean with an Atlantic connection, and even that is Indian Ocean. The sixgill sawshark of southern Africa is the odd one out, with six gill slits rather than five and its own genus, Pliotrema.

In its own waters the only animal it can be confused with is not a shark at all but the smalltooth sawfish, a ray of the Florida and Bahamian shallows that is critically endangered and fully protected. A sawfish is far bigger, lives in shallow coastal water and has gill slits under its head and no barbels; the Bahamas sawshark is under a metre long, lives on the deep slope and has side gills and barbels. For the whole family, see our overview of the types of sharks.

• Japanese Sawsharkspecies profile
• Longnose Sawsharkspecies profile
• Shortnose Sawsharkspecies profile
• African Dwarf Sawsharkspecies profile
• Tropical Sawsharkspecies profile
• Sixgill Sawsharkspecies profile

Written and reviewed by

SharkSider Editorial Team

A small team focused on researching sharks and making marine biology easy to understand. Every page is reviewed against current species records and the SharkSider attack database, and updated when new incidents or research appear.

Published December 1, 2014 · Last updated September 22, 2026 · No incident attributed to this species in the SharkSider attack database, which is updated weekly.